State of the World 2001: The Challenge of a Globalizing World

By The Worldwatch Institute

From the thinning of the Arctic sea ice to the invasion of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, State of the World 2001 shows how the economic boom of the last decade has damaged natural systems. The increasingly visible evidence of environmental deterioration is only the tip of a much more dangerous problem: the growing inequities in wealth and income between countries and within countries, inequities that will generate enormous social unrest and pressure for change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610916387

Book preview

State of the World

2001

State of the World

2001

A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society

Lester R. Brown

Christopher Flavin

Hilary French

Janet N. Abramovitz

Seth Dunn

Gary Gardner

Lisa Mastny

Ashley Mattoon

David Roodman

Payal Sampat

Molly O. Sheehan

Linda Starke, Editor

W · W · NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright © 2001 by Worldwatch Institute

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

The STATE OF THE WORLD and WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE trademarks are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Worldwatch Institute; of its directors, officers, or staff; or of its funders.

The text of this book is composed in Galliard, with the display set in Franklin Gothic and Gill Sans. Book design by Elizabeth Doherty; composition by Worldwatch Institute; manufacturing by the Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.

First Edition

ISBN 0-393-04866-7

ISBN 0-393-32082-0 (pbk)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A IPU

Worldwatch Institute Board of Directors

Lester R. Brown Chairman

UNITED STATES

Øystein Dahle

Vice Chairman

NORWAY

Andrew Rice

Chairman, Executive Committee

UNITED STATES

Orville L. Freeman

Chairman Emeritus

UNITED STATES

Christopher Flavin

(Ex Officio)

UNITED STATES

Cathy Crain

UNITED STATES

Thomas Crain

UNITED STATES

Herman Daly

UNITED STATES

James Dehlsen

UNITED STATES

Lynne Gallagher

UNITED STATES

Hazel Henderson

UNITED STATES

Abderrahman Khene

ALGERIA

Hunter Lewis

UNITED STATES

Scott McVay

UNITED STATES

Larry Minear

UNITED STATES

Izaak van Melle

THE NETHERLANDS

Wren Wirth

UNITED STATES

Worldwatch Institute Staff

Janet N. Abramovitz

Ed Ayres

Richard Bell

Chris Bright

Lester R. Brown

Lori A. Brown

Niki Clark

Suzanne Clift

Elizabeth Doherty

Seth Dunn

Barbara Fallin

Christopher Flavin

Hilary French

Gary Gardner

Joseph Gravely

Jonathan Guzman

Brian Halweil

Millicent Johnson

Reah Janise Kauffman

Sharon Lapier

Janet Larsen

Lisa Mastny

Ashley Mattoon

Anne Platt McGinn

Mary Redfern

Michael Renner

David Malin Roodman

Curtis Runyan

Payal Sampat

Molly O. Sheehan

Christine Stearn

Denise Warden

Worldwatch Institute Management Team

Christopher Flavin

President

Richard Bell

Vice President, Communications

Hilary French

Vice President, Research

Ed Ayres

Editorial Director

Barbara Fallin

Director of Finance and Administration

Acknowledgments

Every member of the talented Worldwatch staff—along with legions of friends and colleagues from outside the Institute—had a hand in producing this eighteenth edition of State of the World. Writers, editors, marketers, administrative support, librarians, interns, reviewers, and funders all deserve our sincere thanks.

We begin by acknowledging the foundation community, whose faithful support sustains and encourages us. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the United Nations Population Fund made grants specifically for State of the World, while a host of other generous donors funded the Institute’s work overall: the Compton Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Summit Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the Wallace Genetic Foundation, the Weeden Foundation, the Winslow Foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund.

We are also grateful to the growing numbers of individual donors who support our work, including the 3,000-strong Friends of Worldwatch—our enthusiastic donors who are strongly committed to Worldwatch and its efforts to contribute to a sustainable world. And we are indebted to the Institute’s Council of Sponsors, including Tom and Cathy Crain, Roger and Vicki Sant, Robert Wallace and Raisa Scriabine, and Eckart Wintzen, for their strong expression of confidence in our work through their generous annual contributions of $50,000 or more.

In this year of transition, we are particularly grateful to Board members Tom and Cathy Crain and James and Deanna Dehlsen, who provided leadership gifts of $250,000 each to support the Institute’s Second Generation Fund, a general support fund that is helping the Institute in its capacity building efforts and in launching its second generation initiatives. We also want to thank the entire Board of Directors for contributing additional support for the Second Generation Fund.

The Institute was fortunate in 2000 to recruit an unusually bright and productive group of research interns who tenaciously tracked down data and other vital information from all over the world. Bryan Mignone ably compiled and analyzed statistical data for Chapter 5; Mike Montag produced much of the extensive documentation for data-rich Chapters 6 and 7; Ann Hwang applied her expertise in chemistry, and Danielle Nierenberg and Jennifer Silva worked conscientiously on Chapter 2; and David Ruppert cheerfully lent his abundant energy to the research efforts for Chapters 1, 4, and 10. Keenly intelligent and good-natured, each was a stimulating addition to our summer staff.

The interns’ information-gathering process is augmented by the Institute’s library staff. Research librarian Lori Brown, office assistant Jonathan Guzman, and volunteer assistant librarian Maya Johnson track down books and articles with remarkable efficiency, and help researchers to manage the information from the myriad newspapers, periodicals, reports, and books that arrive at the Institute each day. We are grateful for their patience with last-minute rush requests.

Once the research and initial writing are done, draft chapters are reviewed to ensure that findings are accurate and clearly communicated. At the 2000 staff review meeting in September, authors and interns were joined by World Watch magazine staffers Ed Ayres and Curtis Runyan, Worldwatch alumnus John Young, and researchers Brian Halweil and Michael Renner for a day of reflection on the state of the chapters. The authors are grateful for the excellent advice they received on how to improve the drafts. They also appreciate the inspired advice and support of their research colleagues Chris Bright and Anne Platt McGinn, who were working on other projects this year.

Experts from outside the Institute also read portions of the manuscript with a critical eye. Typically these are global authorities on our chapter topics, whose generous gifts of time and expertise we greatly appreciate. For their review comments, we are particularly grateful to Eduardo Athayde, Jesse Ausubel, Duncan Brack, Cynthia Carey, Jennifer Clapp, James P. Collins, Susan Cutter, Joseph Domagalski, Cheryl Goodman, Robert Hamilton, Gavin Hayman, Ailsa Holloway, Craig Hoover, David Hunter, Jorge Illueca, Lee Kimball, Adrian Lawrence, Karen R. Lips, Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Caroline Michellier, Larry Minear, Mary Fran Myers, Joan Nelson, Thomas Nolan, James O’Meara, Michael Penders, Deike Peters, Sue Pfiffner, Roger Pielke, Jr., Jamie K. Reaser, Forest Reinhardt, Christian Suter, Louis S. Thompson, David B. Wake, Jonathan Walter, Carol Welch, Angelika Wertz, Gilbert White, and John Williamson. As always, we benefited this year from the advice and ideas of Bill Mansfield, who is active in the international environmental policy arena.

Linda Starke and Liz Doherty shepherd the reworked chapters in the home stretch of production. Linda massaged the work of nearly a dozen authors into a harmonious whole in this, her fortieth Worldwatch Book. Liz gives our research a strong aesthetic appeal through artful formatting of chapters and design of figures and tables. Ritch Pope finalizes the production by preparing the index.

Our communications staff works on several fronts to ensure that the State of the World message circulates widely beyond our Washington offices. Early in the research process, Mary Caron helped researchers to think about media messages that might emerge from their work. In her work on press outreach, Mary was ably supported by the dependable efforts of Liz Hopper. When Liz moved to Germany in September, Niki Clark confidently assumed responsibility for backing up the communications team. Denise Warden also joined us this year, bringing her creativity and expertise to our marketing efforts. Dick Bell oversees these operations as well as our communications team, including the Institute’s expanding Web site, which is developed by our superb Webmaster and computer systems administrator, Christine Stearn. Jason Yu, our first computer intern, was instrumental in revamping the Worldwatch bookstore on our Web site. Finally, the work of the communications team is complemented by the friendly customer service and order fulfillment provided by Millicent Johnson, Joseph Gravely, and Sharon Lapier.

All these efforts would be impossible without strong administrative backing. Reah Janise Kauffman assists board chairman Lester Brown with his time-consuming travel schedule and his many writings, and works to ensure that State of the World and other Institute publications are extensively translated and published outside the United States. Janet Larsen, who joined the Institute this year, provides invaluable research assistance for Lester’s work. Barbara Fallin ably handles the Institute’s finances and keeps the Institute well stocked and the staff well fed. Suzanne Clift cheerfully backs up the work of our president and vice president for research, and helps researchers with travel and other logistical matters. Mary Redfern, meanwhile, ably supported the Institute’s fundraising activities, working closely with our foundation supporters and individual donors.

We give special thanks to our overseas colleagues for their extraordinary efforts to spread the message of environmental sustainability. State of the World is published in some 30 languages—in 2000, we added Estonian, Portuguese, and Ukrainian editions—thanks largely to the dedication of a host of publishers, civil society groups, and individuals who translate and publish our research. For a list of these publishers, see <www.worldwatch.org/foreign/index.html>. We would particularly like to acknowledge the help we receive from Magnar Norderhaug in Norway, Hamid Taravaty and Farsaneh Bahar in Iran, Soki Oda in Japan, Gianfranco Bologna in Italy, Eduardo Athayde in Brazil, and Jonathan Sinclair Wilson in England.

Our long-standing relationship with our publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, remains strong thanks to the production and promotion efforts of our colleagues there: Amy Cherry, Andrew Marasia, and Lucinda Bartley. As always, Norton continues to give the Institute’s publications broad exposure, especially in college and university bookstores around the United States.

Finally, we welcome into the extended Worldwatch family Joseph Hugh McGinn III, the newborn son of researcher Anne Platt McGinn and her husband, Joe. Jack is a source of delight to all of us on his visits to the office—and a strong source of motivation for Anne’s work this year on eliminating persistent organic pollutants. It is our fervent hope that Jack and his generation will inherit a world well on its way to sustainability.

Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin, and Hilary French

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Tables and Figures

Foreword

1Rich Planet, Poor Planet Christopher Flavin

A Tale of Two Worlds

Testing the Limits

Seizing the Moment

North Meets South

2Uncovering Groundwater Pollution Payal Sampat

Valuing Groundwater

Tracking the Hidden Crisis

The Slow Creep of Nitrogen

Pesticides on Tap

The Pervasiveness of Volatile Organic Compounds

The Threat of Natural Contaminants

Changing Course

3Eradicating Hunger: A Growing Challenge Lester R. Brown

A Hunger Report: Status and Prospects

Raising Cropland Productivity

Raising Water Productivity

Restructuring the Protein Economy

Eradicating Hunger: The Key Steps

4Deciphering Amphibian Declines Ashley Mattoon

Why Amphibia?

Beyond the Declines

Reconceiving the Science

Protecting Amphibians

5Decarbonizing the Energy Economy Seth Dunn

The Climate Constraint

From Solid to Liquid to Gas

Improving Energy Intensity

Beyond Fossil Fuels

Entering the Hydrogen Age

Deliberate Decarbonization

6Making Better Transportation Choices Molly O’Meara Sheehan

From Sledge to Jet

Current Transport Trends

The Costs of Mobility

Clearing the Air

Diversifying Our Options

Identifying Bottlenecks

7Averting Unnatural Disasters Janet N. Abramovitz

Counting Disasters

Ecological Vulnerability

Social Vulnerability

The Politics and Psychology of Disasters

Fostering Resilience in Nature and Communities

8Ending the Debt Crisis David Malin Roodman

Costs of Crisis

The Year of Jubilee

Debt History

Sources of the Official Debt Crisis

Adjusting to Reality

Lending, Development, and Accountability

9Controlling International Hilary French and Lisa Mastny

The Treaty Landscape

Species at Risk

Cracking Down on Dumping

Atmospheric Assaults

From Words to Action

10Accelerating the Shift to Sustainability Gary Gardner

Anatomy of Change

Empowering the Base: The Role of Civil Society

Greening Commerce: The Role of Business

Building Coalitions: The Role of Government

Accelerating Cultural Evolution

Notes

Worldwatch Database Disk

Worldwatch Institute makes the data from all graphs and tables from all its publications, including this book, available in Microsoft Excel 5.0/95 spreadsheet format on 3-1/2-inch disks for use with PC or Macintosh computers. For more information or to order the Database Disk, visit our website at <www.worldwatch.org>, call us at 1-800-555-2028, or e-mail us at [e-mail].

Visit our Web site at www.worldwatch.org

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

1Rich Planet, Poor Planet

1-1The E-9: A Population and Economic Profile

1-2Economic Trends in E-9 Nations

1-3Health Indicators in E-9 Nations

1-4Education in E-9 Nations

1-5Ecological Health in E-9 Nations

1-6Air Pollution in E-9 Nations

1-7The E-9: Leaders for the Twenty-first Century

2Uncovering Groundwater Pollution

2-1Groundwater as a Share of Drinking Water Use, by Region, Late 1990s

2-2Some Major Threats to Groundwater

2-3High Nitrate Levels in Groundwater, Selected Regions, 1990s

2-4Groundwater Contamination in the United States, Selected Chemicals, 1990s

2-5Selected Examples of Aquifers Abandoned due to Chemical Pollution

2-6Evaluating Responses to Groundwater Pollution

3Eradicating Hunger: A Growing Challenge

3-1Cropland, Rangeland, and Oceanic Fishery Contributions to World Food Supply, Measured in Grain Equivalent, 1999

3-2Gains in World Grain Yield Per Hectare, 1950-2000

3-3World Production of Animal Protein by Source, 1990-2000

4Deciphering Amphibian Declines

4-1Selected Large-Scale Losses of Amphibians

4-2Global Distribution of Amphibians

4-3Major Known Hotspots of Amphibian Diversity

6Making Better Transportation Choices

6-1Road and Rail Networks, Selected Countries, Mid-1980s and Mid-1990s

6-2Estimates of Societal Costs of Road Transport as Share of GDP

6-3Suggested Principles for Sustainable Transportation

6-4Automotive Sector Ranking in Advertising Spending, United States and World, 1998

8Ending the Debt Crisis

8-1Share of Government Spending Covered by Foreign Borrowing and Devoted to Foreign Debt Service and Basic Social Services, Selected Countries, 1996-97

8-2International Debt Crises Since 1820

8-3Foreign Debt Burdens of Developing and Eastern Bloc Countries, 1982

8-4Reasons IMF and World Bank Pressure for Structural Adjustment Is Weaker Than It Seems

9Controlling International Environmental Crime

9-1A Timeline of Selected International Environmental Agreements

9-2Selected Treaty Secretariats—A Comparison of Resources

9-3Selected Species Threatened by Illegal Wildlife Trade

Figures

1Rich Planet, Poor Planet

1-1Certified Organic Agricultural Area in European Union, 1985-99

1-2World Wind Energy Generating Capacity, 1980-99

3Eradicating Hunger: A Growing Challenge

3-1World Grain Production Per Person, 1950-2000

3-2Oceanic Fish Catch and Beef and Mutton Production Per Person, 1950-99

3-3Wheat Yield Per Hectare in Mexico, 1961-2000

3-4World Irrigated Area Per Person, 1950-98

3-5World Meat Production, 1950-99

3-6Milk Production in India and the United States, 1966-2000

3-7Total World Population, 1950-98, with Projections to 2050

5Decarbonizing the Energy Economy

5-1Carbon Intensity of the World Economy, 1950-99

5-2Global Carbon Cycle

5-3World Carbon Emissions from Fossil Fuel Burning, 1751-1999

5-4Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Temperature Change, 420,000 Years Ago-Present

5-5World Fossil Fuel Consumption by Source, 1950-99

5-6Carbon Intensities, Selected Industrial Economies, 1980-99

5-7Carbon Intensities, Selected Developing Economies, 1980-99

5-8Carbon Intensities, Selected Former Eastern Bloc Economies, 1991-99

6Making Better Transportation Choices

6-1World Passenger Traffic, Rail Versus Air, 1980-97

6-2Transportation Energy Use by Mode in the United States, Germany, and Japan, 1995

6-3Global Transport Energy and Population, by Region

7Averting Unnatural Disasters

7-1Rising Tide of Major Disasters, by Decade

7-2Global Deaths by Disaster Type, 1985-99

7-3Global Economic Losses from Disasters, by Region, 1985-99

7-4Disaster Losses, Total and as Share of GNP, in the Richest and Poorest Nations, 1985-99

8Ending the Debt Crisis

8-1Gross Domestic Product Per Person, Latin America and Africa, 1950-99

8-2Number of Countries Not Servicing All Their Foreign Debts, 1820-1999

8-3Foreign Debt of Developing and Former Eastern Bloc Nations, 1970-99

8-4New, Long-term Official Lending to Low-income Developing Countries, 1970-99

9Controlling International Environmental Crime

9-1International Environmental Treaties, 1921-99

10Accelerating the Shift to Sustainability

10-1Hypothetical Global Wind Generation, 2000-40

10-2Battery Recycling in the United States, 1993-97, with Projections to 2005 and Hypothetical Saturation Point

10-3HIV Prevalence Among Pregnant Women, South Africa and Thailand, 1990-99

Foreword

Few places on Earth are as remote or pristine as Greenland. Lying just south of the North Pole between Scandinavia and northern Canada, Greenland is largely uninhabited and covered year-round by a massive ice sheet that has built up through millions of years of snowfall. With minimal human habitation and few automobiles, farms, or factories, Greenland would seem to be insulated from the kind of ecological damage that is so widespread in other parts of the world.

It came as a surprise, therefore, when in 2000 a team of U.S. scientists discovered that the vast Greenland ice sheet is melting. The ice, which covers an area greater than that of Mexico, contains enough water to fill the Mediterranean Sea two thirds full. It is estimated to be losing some 51 billion cubic meters of water a year, a rate that already approaches the annual flow of the Nile River—accounting for 7 percent of the observed annual rise in global sea levels. An article in Science reports that if the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, sea level would rise 7 meters, or 23 feet.

Although the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet received far less attention last year than such events as the dramatic U.S. election in November or the Sydney Olympic Games, its long-run human significance is far greater. Almost anywhere it is found on Earth, from Himalayan glaciers to Antarctica, ice is melting away—one of the most striking signs of the rising global temperatures that are caused by the burning of billions of tons of fossil fuels each year.

If fossil fuel combustion were to continue at these levels or higher throughout the new century—as it did during the last one—virtually every natural system and human economy would be at risk from rising seas, more severe storms, or more intense droughts. A major scientific review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October 2000 concluded that new evidence suggests the rate of warming in this century could be even greater than estimated by earlier studies.

Climate change is beginning to exacerbate the ecological decline that is provoked by other environmental stresses. One of the most worrisome examples of these dangerous synergies is found in the worldwide decline of many species of frogs, salamanders, and other Amphibia described by Ashley Mattoon in Chapter 4 of this year’s book—a global phenomenon that has a multiplicity of underlying causes, ranging from climate change to introduced diseases.

And it is not just other species that are suffering. The immense human toll from the rising tide of natural disasters over the last decade, described by Janet Abramovitz in Chapter 7, is a powerful reminder that human activities can dramatically alter natural processes, with unpredictable and often catastrophic results. The economies of Central America, for example, still have not recovered from the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in late 1998.

An indication of the scale of these threats came in a report from scientists in Indonesia just as this year’s State of the World was going to press: half of the once vast coral reefs that surrounded the world’s largest archipelago have been destroyed—apparently due to a combination of deforestation, marine pollution, and rising temperatures. The decline of the reefs, which account for 14 percent of the world’s corals, threatens hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue from fishing and tourism that are needed to recover from Indonesia’s worst financial crisis in a generation. Maritime Affairs Minister Sarwono Kusmaatmadja said the government was so distracted by recent political and economic crises that it had failed to protect a resource that is key to Indonesia’s future.

Human-induced environmental change far exceeds the natural pace of evolution, so our species finds itself in a tight race to adapt quickly enough to keep pace with the environmental problems we are creating with such abandon. We live in a period of epoch change, but can we change in time?

Human Natures, a new book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, argues that in response to rapidly changing circumstances, human nature is now evolving much more rapidly than our underlying genetic makeup is. Technologies, institutions, and even value systems are in rapid flux due to accelerated cultural evolution. In the final chapter of this State of the World, Gary Gardner examines what it will take to achieve the kind of change needed to create an environmentally sustainable society. His conclusion, after reviewing past patterns of change, is that concerted efforts could lead us to one of the most dramatic periods of transformation the world has ever seen.

These efforts will not succeed, however, unless attempts to address environmental problems are paralleled by equally hard work to deal with the world’s social ills. Many societies have seen inequality and poverty rise in recent years. Increased investment in health and education, expanded access to credit, and greater social and political rights for women are among the keys to economic and environmental progress in the years ahead.

Many chapters of State of the World 2001 focus on areas in which important change is already under way. For example, in Chapter 9, Hilary French and Lisa Mastny discuss initiatives to enhance the enforcement of the array of environmental treaties agreed to in recent decades. And in Chapter 6, Molly Sheehan examines the growing interest in innovative solutions to the transportation problems that plague many parts of the world today.

One of the biggest challenges in the new century is stabilizing Earth’s climate, which will require a nearly complete transformation of the world’s energy systems. This monumental task now appears just a bit less out of reach due to another icebreaking development just a few hundred kilometers to the east of Greenland. The tiny nation of Iceland has launched plans to make itself a pioneer developer of a twenty-first century energy system that relies on renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.

As described by Seth Dunn in Chapter 5, Iceland’s goal is to use its abundant geothermal energy and hydropower to produce hydrogen from seawater, relying on the new fuel to run its factories, motor vehicles, and fishing fleet. The scheme, which is attracting investments from scores of companies, including multinationals such as DaimlerChrysler and Royal Dutch Shell, would make the island nation of 270,000 people the first to have the kind of environmentally sustainable energy system that may be found everywhere before the century is over. Hydrogen pioneer Bragi Arnason of the University of Iceland says, Many people ask me how soon this will happen. I tell them, We are living at the beginning of the transition. You will see the end of it. And your children, they will live in this world.

Worldwatch Institute itself has entered a period of historic change. Led by our Board of Directors, the Institute launched its second generation of environmental leadership when Senior Vice President Christopher Flavin was selected to be the Institute’s second President. The Institute’s founding President, Lester Brown, has become Chairman of the Board, and former Board Chairman Andrew Rice is now Chairman of the Executive Committee.

The Institute’s Board and staff are developing plans to further enhance WorldWatch’s reach and effectiveness, building on the organization’s strong global reputation and the talents of its staff to meet the needs of a new century. The original mission of the Worldwatch Institute—to provide the information and ideas needed to create an environmentally sustainable society—will remain at the heart of its new agenda. But the rapid evolution of the issues we study, and of the information economy we rely on for dissemination, demands fresh approaches.

In the coming year, we will launch a series of initiatives that are intended to allow Worldwatch to reach key decision-makers in the public and private sectors more systematically, while continuing to build a broad public audience. We will develop and disseminate practical solutions to global problems, using the new tools of the information economy to reach millions of users, thereby expanding the already sizable market for the Institute’s publications. In order to achieve these goals, the Institute will also focus on internal capacity building in the years ahead, expanding its staff with an emphasis on strengthening our marketing and development capabilities.

During the past year, we have already begun to extend our presence on the Internet, making many of our publications available for sale electronically, and even posting audio recordings of Institute events on our Web site, www.worldwatch.org. Also, Lester Brown has begun writing a series of frequent four-page Worldwatch Issue Alerts that are posted on the Web site and disseminated via e-mail. In the months ahead, we plan to create an electronic, searchable library of Worldwatch Papers that will be available on the Web site.

Meanwhile, changes are under way in the release of State of the World itself. This year, for the first time, the report will be simultaneously launched in January in up to five countries and in as many as three languages: the United States, India, and the United Kingdom (English editions), Brazil, and South Korea. We appreciate the exceptional efforts of the publishers—Lawrence Surendra of Earthworm Books in India, Jonathan Sinclair Wilson of Earthscan Publications in the United Kingdom, Eduardo Athayde of the Mid-Atlantic Forest Open University in Brazil, and Yul Choi of the Korean Federation of Environmental Movement in Korea—who made this possible.

Their work, combined with the extraordinary efforts of our many other international publishers, gives us all hope that our vision of a sustainable future will be realized. We were encouraged this past year when Ukrainian was added to the 30 or so languages in which State of the World has been published. Information on our international publishers can be found at www.worldwatch.org/foreign/index.html.

We hope you will find State of the World useful in your own efforts to understand and shape our fast-changing world. Please send us any comments on this edition or suggestions for future editions by letter, fax [phone]), or e-mail ([e-mail]).

Lester R. Brown

Christopher Flavin

Hilary French

Worldwatch Institute

1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20036

December 2000

State of the World

2001

Chapter 1

Rich Planet, Poor Planet

Christopher Flavin

A visit to Brazil’s tropical state of Bahia provides contrasting views of the state of the world at the dawn of the new millennium. Bahia’s capital, Salvador, has a population of over 3 million and a thoroughly modern veneer. Its downtown is full of large office buildings and busy construction cranes, and its highways are crammed with sport utility vehicles. The state is also rich in natural resources: the wealth provided by gold and sugarcane made Salvador the obvious location for colonial Brazil’s leading port and capital for two centuries.¹

Once a backwater—slavery was not outlawed until the end of the nineteenth century, one of the last regions to ban this practice—Bahia’s economy is now booming. The state has a prospering manufacturing sector and has become popular with many leading multinationals, including automobile companies that have put some of their most advanced factories there. The information economy is in a particularly competitive frenzy. Brazilian Internet service providers are connecting customers for free, and cell phones appear to be almost as common as they are in many European cities.

Scratch the surface, however, and another Bahia is still there. The large favelas that ring Salvador’s outskirts are crowded with thousands of poor people who lack more than cell phones and computers: toilets, running water, and schoolbooks are among the basic services and products that are unavailable to many of Bahia’s poor. Similar gaps can be seen in the low hills that run south of Salvador along Bahia’s rugged coast: the collapse of many of the country’s rich cacao farms due to a devastating pathogen called witches’-broom and a sharp decline in world chocolate prices have left thousands of farm workers jobless and unable to provide for their families.

Bahia’s environmental condition is just as uneven. Considered by ecologists to be one of the world’s biological hot spots, the Atlantic Rain Forest covers more than 2,000 kilometers of Brazil’s subtropical coast. In 1993, biologists working in an area south of Salvador identified a world record 450 tree species in a single hectare. (A hectare of forest in the northeastern United States typically contains 10 species.) In the last decade, Bahia’s political and business leaders have come to recognize the extraordinary richness of their biological heritage—wildlands are being protected, ecological research facilities are being set up, and ecotourist resorts are mushrooming. A sign at the airport even warns travelers that removing endemic species from the country is a felony.²

And yet, signs of destruction are everywhere: cattle ranches sprawl where the world’s richest forests once stood; 93 percent of the Atlantic forest is already gone, and much of the remainder is fragmented into tiny plots. Pressure on these last bits of forest is enormous—both from powerful landowners and corporations eager to sell forest and agricultural products in the global marketplace, and from poor families desperately seeking a living.³

This picture of Bahia in the year 2000 is replicated at scores of locations around the globe. It is the picture of a world undergoing extraordinarily rapid change amid huge and widening disparities. Unprecedented economic prosperity, the emergence of democratic institutions in many countries, and the near instantaneous flow of information and ideas throughout a newly interconnected world allow us to address challenges that have been neglected for decades: meeting the material needs of all 6 billion members of the human race, and restoring a sustainable balance between humanity and Earth’s ecological systems.

This moment is historic, perhaps even evolutionary, in character. Tragically, it is not being seized. Despite a surge in economic growth in recent years and significant gains in health and education levels in many developing nations, the number of people who survive on less than $1 of income per day—the poverty threshold used by the World Bank—was 1.2 billion in 1998, almost unchanged since 1990. In some parts of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union, the number living in poverty is substantially higher than the figures recorded a decade ago.⁴

The struggle to restore the planet’s ecological health presents a similar picture: a number of small battles have been won, but the war itself is still being lost. Double-digit rates of growth in renewable energy markets, plus a two-year decline in global carbon emissions, for example, have failed to slow the rate of global climate change. Indeed, recent evidence, from the rapid melting of glaciers and the declining health of heat-sensitive coral reefs, suggests that climate change is accelerating. The same pattern can be seen in the increased commitment to protection of wild areas and biological diversity: new laws are being passed, consumers are demanding ecofriendly wood products, and eco-tourist resorts are sprouting almost as quickly as dot-com companies. But foresters and biologists report that this host of encouraging developments has not reversed the massive loss of forests or the greatest extinction crisis the world has seen in 65 million years.⁵

Long considered distinct issues, consigned to separate government agencies, ecological and social problems are in fact tightly interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The burden of dirty air and water and of decimated natural resources invariably falls on the disadvantaged. And the poor, in turn, are often compelled to tear town down the last nearby tree or pollute the local stream in order to survive. Solving one problem without addressing the other is simply not feasible. In fact, poverty and environmental decline are both embedded deeply in today’s economic systems. Neither is a peripheral problem that can be considered in isolation. What is needed is what Eduardo Athayde, General Director of Bahia’s Atlantic Forest Open University, calls econology, a synthesis of ecology, sociology, and economics that can be used as the basis for creating an economy that is both socially and ecologically sustainable—the central challenge facing humanity as the new millennium begins.⁶

The challenge is made larger by the fact that it must be met simultaneously at national and global levels, requiring not only cooperation but partnership between North and South. Responsibility for the current health of the planet and its human inhabitants is shared unequally between rich and poor countries, but if these problems are to be resolved, the two groups of nations will need to bring their respective strengths and capabilities to bear. This will require a new form of globalization—one that goes beyond trade links and capital flows to strengthened political and social ties between governments and civil society.

A select group of large industrial and developing countries—a collection that can be called the E-9, given that they are key environmental as well as economic players—could have a central role in closing the North-South gap. Together, this group of countries accounts for 57 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of total economic output. (See Table 1-1.) This chapter uses data on these nine diverse countries and areas to illuminate key economic, social, and ecological trends. But this grouping has more than just analytical value. As argued at the end of the chapter, E-9 cooperation could be a key to achieving accelerated economic and environmental progress in the new century.⁷

Table 1-1. The E-9: A Population and Economic Profile

¹Data for European Union do not include Luxembourg.

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2000 (Washington, DC: 2000), 10-12; Population Reference Bureau, 2000 World Population Data Sheet, wall chart (Washington, DC: June 2000).

A Tale of Two Worlds

Halfway through the year 2000, two stories from the Philippines made headlines around the world. In June, a computer virus dubbed the love bug appeared almost simultaneously on every continent, crashing the computer systems of scores of multinational corporations and government offices, ranging from the U.S. Pentagon to the British Parliament. The estimated total cost of the resulting disruptions: $10 billion. Computer security experts and FBI agents quickly traced the diabolical love bug to a small Manila technical college and a 24-year-old student named Onel de Guzman. For computer experts, this may have been an indication of the vulnerability of the global Internet, but in the Philippines it quickly became a source of national pride. People took the love bug debacle as an encouraging sign that their developing nation was leapfrogging into the top ranks of the global economy’s hottest sector.⁸

Economic successes and social failures are found side by side around the world in this supposed time of plenty.

Across town, a Manila neighborhood called the Promised Land was hit by a different kind of news a month later: more than 200 people were killed in a massive landslide and subsequent fire. Although this tragedy was precipitated by Typhoon Kai-Tak, it was anything but a natural disaster. The Promised Land, it turns out, is a combination garbage dump/shantytown that is home to 50,000 people, most of whom make their living by scavenging the food and materials discarded by Manila’s growing middle class. When two days of heavy rain loosened the mountain of garbage, it came crashing down on hundreds of homes as well as the dump’s electrical lines, starting a massive fire. Scores of Promised Land residents were buried, others were burned alive, and still more were poisoned by toxic chemicals released by the fire.⁹

Economic successes and social failures are now found side by side, not just in the Philippines, but around the world in this supposed time of plenty. The annual output of the world economy has grown from $31 trillion in 1990 to $42 trillion in 2000; by comparison, the total output of the world economy in 1950 was just $6.3 trillion. And in 2000, the growth of the world economy surged to a 4.7-percent annual rate, the highest in the last decade. This increase in economic activity has allowed billions of people to buy new refrigerators, televisions, and computers, and has created millions of jobs. Global telephone connections grew from 520 million in 1990 to 844 million in 1998 (an increase of 62 percent), and mobile phone subscribers went from 11 million to 319 million in that time (up 2,800 percent). The number of host computers, a measure of the Internet’s expansion, grew from 376,000 in 1990 to 72,398,000 in 1999—an increase of 19,100 percent.¹⁰

The economic boom of the last decade has not been confined to the rich countries of the North. Much of the growth is occurring in the developing nations of Asia and Latin America, where economic reforms, lowered trade barriers, and a surge in foreign capital have fueled investment and consumption. Between 1990 and 1998, Brazil’s economy grew 30 percent, India’s expanded 60 percent, and China’s mushroomed by a remarkable 130 percent. China now has the world’s third largest economy (second if measured in terms of purchasing power parity), and a booming middle class who work in offices, eat fast food, watch color television, and surf the Internet. China alone now has 420 million radios, 344 million television sets, 24 million mobile phones, and 15 million computers.¹¹

Still, the global economy remains tarnished by vast disparities. (See Table 1-2.) Gross national product (GNP) per person ranges from $32,350 in Japan to $4,630 in Brazil, $2,260 in Russia, and just $440 in India. Even when measured in purchasing power terms, GNP per person among these countries varies by a factor of 10. Per capita income has increased 3 percent annually in 40 countries since 1990, but more than 80 nations have per capita incomes that are lower than they were a decade ago. Within countries, the disparities are even more striking. In the United States, the top 10 percent of the population has six times the income of the lowest 20 percent; in Brazil, the ratio is 19 to 1. More than 10 percent of the people living in rich countries are still below the poverty line, and in many, inequality has grown over the last two decades.¹²

Table 1-2. Economic Trends in E-9 Nations

¹Data are from a single year within the time frame.

²Comparable data for European Union not available; Germany is most populous EU member.

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2000 (Washington, DC: 2000), 10-12, 62-64, 66-68.

The boom in global consumption over the past decade has been accompanied by improvements in living standards in many countries and declines in others. The U.N. Development Programme estimates that the share of the world’s population suffering from what it calls low human development fell from 20 percent in 1975 to 10 percent in 1997. Still, World Bank figures show that 2.8 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, survive on an income of less than $2 per day, while a fifth of humanity, 1.2